InsideNUP

Treating Back Problems in Athletes Versus Non-Athletes

2012-01-25T03:19:00.000-08:00

Most of us have had a ‘bad back’ as some stage and will know how when it hits, every movement, step, lift or sneeze can be excruciating, with few positions being comfortable. If we were lucky it will have only lasted a few hours our a few days, however the reality is that back pain is one of the biggest causes of ‘time off work’ and many people will have prolonged and recurrent episodes.

A recent article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine [1] points out that amongst the general population, psycho-social links to low back pain along with the complexity of the back's structure make specific patho-anatomical diagnosis of back injury difficult. On the back of this the majority of patients within health services are labeled as having ‘non-specific back pain’ (NSBP). That being the case, the author, a respected back pain researcher and practitioner, advocates a bio-psycho-social model of care addressing behavioral as well as physical issues.

In the last 10 years I’ve been working in international cricket, athletics and now rugby, sports where back injury is always in the top three problems resulting in lost training and competition time. My belief is that the influence of psycho-social risk factors linked to back pain such as low levels of job satisfaction, psychological distress, smoking, obesity and heightened fear of activity are much less of an influence on back injury in the athletic population.

If a sports person has significant injury then it can usually be attributed to a specific mechanism with identifiable structural damage. For example, fast bowlers in cricket are prone to lower back stress fractures due to repeated extreme bending of the spine during the delivery stride, and front-row forwards in rugby have a very high rate of neck pain attributable to disc damage, associated with flexing and compressing the spine in the scrum.

Rare is the athlete who will accept a diagnosis of ‘non-specific lower back or neck, pain’ and those managing their care will be expected to provide a clear diagnosis and treatment plan. The danger of an approach that doesn’t prioritise relevant anatomical injury is that it can, and has, led to a shift away from the use of some valuable diagnostic tests and interventions. Rather than simply not offering what could well be very useful types of scans, therapies, injection procedures and even surgeries to wrongly homogenized groups of NSBP patients, better outcomes might be obtained by researching and providing specialist services based around practitioners who are able to recognize both psycho-social and patho-anatomical factors in order to direct patients to the most appropriate investigation and treatment.

As pointed out in another recent paper, [2] as the name suggests, ‘bio’ should be at the forefront of a bio-psycho-social approach to managing back injury, particularly in athletes.

Craig Ranson

1. O'Sullivan, P., It's time for change with the management of non-specific chronic low back pain. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2011.
2. Hancock, M.J., C.G. Maher, M. Laslett, E. Hay, and B. Koes, Discussion paper: what happened to the 'bio' in the bio-psycho-social model of low back pain? European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society, 2011.

Ron Michaelis Talks Personalised Medicine

2011-12-13T03:11:00.000-08:00

We are entering an era in which both you and your doctors will use your genetic information to better maintain your health. The information that will be provided by genetic and other tests will enable you and your doctor to better estimate your risk for both rare and common diseases. This information may help you maintain your own health better, by adjusting your diet, environment and lifestyle to avoid the non-genetic factors that increase your risk for the diseases for which you have the greatest genetic risk. In addition, this information will help your doctor choose the safest and most effective drugs and treatments for you when you do get sick, minimizing harmful side effects and ensuring more successful outcomes.

In time, personalised medicine tests will not only include tests of genes, but also tests of proteins, RNAs and other important biomolecules. Currently, however, most of the attention is focused on developing genetic tests. These tests are based on the fact that the sequence of a typical human gene is as variable as any other human trait. Just like heights and hair colors, different people often have slightly different sequences for any given gene. Because your genes make your proteins, when two people have different sequences for a gene, they may also have different levels of activity in the protein that gene makes. One reason you possess your unique combination of physical, emotional, intellectual and medical characteristics is that you possess a unique pattern of high activity in some proteins, typical level of activity in others, and low level of activity in others.

Because your genes make your proteins, you can often estimate the level of activity the person will have in a protein by analyzing the sequence of the corresponding gene. Further, because your proteins regulate all your body's systems and processes, if you know the level of activity in the critical proteins, you can estimate how well a particular system works in the individual. This in turn enables you to estimate that person's risk for the diseases that result if the system in question is not working well. For example, if you know the sequence of the genes that make the proteins that act as ion channels in heart muscle, you may be able to estimate the individual's risk for certain cardiovascular (heart) diseases more accurately than you could otherwise. Alternatively, if you can estimate the level of activity in the proteins that break down a specific drug and clear it from our bodies, you can better predict the probability that a particular person will accumulate too high a concentration of the drug and have an adverse reaction to the drug if he/she is given the dose of that drug that most people are given.

This approach to medicine is referred to as Personalised Medicine (PM), because it allows the doctor to consider the individual patient according to his/her personal characteristics, rather than treat everyone who has a particular disease with the same drug and dose. PM does not only aim to allow doctors to treat patients more safely and effectively. PM also expects people to play a more active role in maintaining their own health than most of us are accustomed to playing. Dr. Leroy Hood helped coin the term "P4 Medicine". The four "Ps" refer to PM being personal, predictive, preventive and participatory. One of the cornerstones of this approach is the understanding that our genetic risk factors interact with risk factors we encounter from our diet, environment and lifestyle to determine our overall risk for a disease. Knowing what diseases you have the highest genetic risk for enables you and your doctor to estimate your risk for diseases more accurately (personal and predictive). In addition, it may help some people tailor their diet, environment and lifestyle, to actively “participate” in maintaining their own health and well being (preventing disease) and try to avoid some of the factors that may further increase their risks for these diseases.

People's access to genetic/genomic information and the role it can play in their lives will continue to expand. At present the cost of many genome sequence tests remains high enough to be out of many people's reach. The cost, though, will continue to drop dramatically, and it will soon be possible to obtain a person's entire DNA sequence for less than $1,000. This of course does not come without its own set of challenges. At present, we do not understand exactly how to translate most of the information that is obtained through genetic tests into risk predictions or treatment recommendations. Because of the sheer number of genes that influence our risks for most diseases, and the complex nature with which they interact with each other and with nongenetic factors, there is still a great deal of research that needs to be done in order to enable doctors to use our genetic information to improve the practice of medicine. The genetic information must be considered in the context of one’s personal and family history, as well as one’s age, sex and medical data (such as blood sugar level).

The ability to obtain this kind of information also carries with it substantial psychological challenges. Some people would rather not know the results of a genetic test if the result may indicate that they have an increased risk for a disease for which there is no effective treatment, such as Alzheimer disease. Genetic counselors help with all aspects of the genetic testing process. A genetic counselor can inform you about the tests that are available, discuss the benefits and limitations of the available tests, help you interpret the information provided by the test and help you cope with the psychological and family issues that may arise.

We are on the brink of a remarkable revolution that promises truly personalised medicine. PM tests will help you better understand your genetic risks, and allow you to become more involved in maintaining your own health and well being by focusing on the environmental and lifestyle factors that are most likely to make your sick. There will also be a change in focus, from an emphasis on treating disease to an emphasis on maintaining health. Before the end of this decade, people will have access to a great deal more information than they have access to now. In order to reap the greatest benefit from these new medical advances, it is critical that you understand how to interpret your genetic information, and what the potential benefits and limitations of the available genetic/genomic tests are.

Ron Michaelis

Kurt Gilliland talks about the Importance of Remembering the Past

2011-11-25T02:17:00.001-08:00

What's in a name? How do physicians really communicate? How does the history of medicine compare to its future?

Meredith Browne, an artist and faculty member at John Abbott College in Montreal, Quebec, who has portrayed many famous physicians writes...

“While most of us are probably familiar with the fact that some parts of our bodies, such as the Fallopian tubes or the Islets of Langerhans on the pancreas, are named for the doctors and scientists who first described them, it is not widely recognized just how many eponyms appear in the study of human anatomy. Like explorers who claimed geographical features in the names of their kings, queens, countries or selves, clinicians and anatomists have left their names on many of our physical features.”

Some of Meredith Brown’s work is featured in Anatomists and Eponyms: Spirit of Anatomy Past. Each of her paintings represents symbolic, narrative, or historical aspects of a body part named for its “discoverer.” Her project addresses a number of questions including what it means that, whether we know it or not, we all carry these honorific references to now long-dead men with us all the time. It is also an experiment in the use of the visual arts as a means of uncovering and interrogating ways of understanding the body and its meanings which come to us from previous iterations of scientific and medical practice.

The small scale of the paintings (like the cover of a book) was chosen to create a resonance with the familiar and intimate act of reading, encouraging the viewer to think about what it means to read the body through the history of medicine and anatomical study. Her paintings required both text-based research into the lives and histories of the men who named these parts of our bodies, and visual research looking for images of historical figures and depictions of anatomical features. She identifies her practice as being a kind of research creation—rather than merely illustrating the famous man and the part of the body he named, each painting represents symbolic, narrative, or historical aspects of a body part named for its “discoverer.”

Eponyms are not just a thing of the past new structures and processes are being named to this day! See what Ole Daniel Enerson has collected on the topic.

Kurt Gilliland

NUP is Moving Office

2011-10-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

We are delighted to advise that we will shortly be moving our offices and warehouse to enable closer contact with our parent University.

Please update your administration and any accounts records, as shown below:

With effect from Tuesday 1^st November 2011 our new contact information will be as follows:

Nottingham University Press

University of Nottingham

King's Meadow Campus

Lenton Lane

Nottingham NG7 2NR

Telephone: +44 (0)115 7484090

Fax: +44 (0)115 7484099

Calls made to our old direct lines and general phone numbers will be forwarded for a limited period of time, but please ensure that you use our new number when possible. This will enable ease of communication until the switch is complete. Personal contact email addresses will not change for the time being.

New E-mail addresses and Direct Line numbers will be notified at a later date.

No changes will be made to our website (www.nup.com) and we hope that you will continue shopping with us. There may be a small period of down-time during the actual move, but please refer back frequently for updates.

We look forward to continuing our excellent service to our customers and colleagues, and to working with you in the future.

NUP

Lawrence Fagg Takes a Look at the World Beneath

2011-10-06T03:30:00.000-07:00

I live on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Although quite modest in size, it is agreeably balanced with some patches of woods and some gently rolling pasture. Thus there is enough variety so that, before she died, my wife, Mary, and I were never bored taking short walks to different parts of the farm.

One time, shortly before sunset, while we were walking just below a gradual rise in the pasture, I happened to look over at the setting sun as its rays grazed the broad crest of the rise and was amazed at what I saw. The sun’s rays had highlighted myriads of spider web strands that linked blades of pasture grass with a golden iridescence. The strands linking the grass blades pointed in every which direction so that the entire surface of the pasture was in effect covered with a soft gossamer blanket of spider web strands we never knew were there. It was a serendipitous glance at the vibrant mini-jungle that thrived right under our feet.

This experience set off a train of thought that in some indefinable way brought a sense of integration and completion to my view of the world around me. This was because, first, I realized that there was a still deeper realm of activity underlying this blanketing mini ecosystem. It was the micro world of the electromagnetically interacting atoms and molecules that are the fundamental ingredients of the spider web strands and the blades of grass. There was a ceaseless atomic activity “underneath” this blanket on which we were treading. Second, the sunlight that nourished the grass by photosynthesis and made it possible to observe this phenomenon was electromagnetic radiation from the sun’s intensely hot surface.

Thus in one cohesive realization I was able to sense the micro-world of atoms and molecules, the macro-world of the spider web blanket, and the cosmic world of the sun, each involving the electromagnetic force in one way or another. So this was an encompassing view of how, of the four forces of physical nature, it is the electromagnetic force that activates all of the nature around us. In fact, it has been harnessed throughout biologic evolution.

This evolution has depended on a multitude of electromagnetic quantum interactions, largely of exquisite sensitivity. They are put into service for the incessant probing, trial-and-error process of communicating, attracting, and repelling that has made possible each new level of chemical and biologic complexity. Indeed all of chemistry and biology depend on electromagnetic interactions. Atoms whose electrons orbit around the nucleus and molecules, however complex, that in turn bind together atoms, are activated by the electromagnetic force. It is highly complex electro-molecular activity that makes possible the life of the blood cells in our bodies and the neurons in our brains.

This wondrous activity is not only to be seen in the fecundity of the living nature that surrounds us, the plants, flowers, and trees, but also in the vibrant stasis of solid objects. It is the electromagnetic force along with certain quantum effects that empowers this stasis to keep the table lamp from falling through the table and the table from falling through the floor.

This pervasiveness of electromagnetism’s role in all of earthly nature extends to include virtually all of modern technology. Indeed the electromagnetic force is the work horse that in one way or another that powers almost all of the tools of modern living. It provides the electric power that runs our factories, lights our homes, and operates our washers and refrigerators. It is a wealth of often subtle electromagnetic interactions that activate the functioning of the computers and cell phones that are such an integral part of today’s life.

It is electromagnetic radiation that carries the messages of our cell phones as well as the signals that give us radio and television programs. Without the use of the properties of this radiation we would have no knowledge of the stars and galaxies in the cosmos. Astronomers have observed galaxies whose light took 13 billion years to arrive here. So, when we look out to the heavens, the entire history of the universe is spread out before our eyes, and it is electromagnetic radiation that tells the story.

However, whether I am reflecting on the world of atoms and molecules or the world of stars and galaxies, I always seem to have my most focused reaction to the encompassing nature of the electromagnetic force in April when I go outside and look at the deep pink blooms on the peach and almond trees as well as the blanketing whiteness of the plum trees. These trees are a source of joy and wonder to me. While I know intellectually that it is the electromagnetic activity that underlies the presence of the blooms and all of the surrounding nature and virtually all of the technology that keeps our world churning on, it is my wonder that abides.

L Fagg

New NUP Online Catalogue for 2012

2011-09-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

Our new Online Digital Catalogue for 2012 is now available for viewing, simply click the catalogue cover. For more information about any of the titles or services please see our website: www.nup.com.

NUP

Peter Altman discusses Answerable Questions Vs Unanswerable Questions

2011-08-22T04:39:00.000-07:00

Over a period of about 3 years I have put together a book on various aspects of Life and the Universe. These are subjects that have interested me, as a scientist, for many years. How did everything start? Where did it all come from? How did life begin, and does it exist anywhere else? UFOs, travel to other planets and galaxies, time travel, the end of the World, is there a divine Creator, what happens when we die?…the potential questions are almost endless.

Questions can be categorised in many ways – by subject matter, by degree of difficulty, and by whether they can be answered at all. Subject matter is straightforward: science, literature, history, general knowledge etc. Degree of difficulty is more subjective, since what is perceived as hard by one person may be very easy for someone else if they happen to know the answer. But answerability is the most intriguing. Consider, for example, the question ‘Does alien life exist?’ There are only two possibilities – either it does or it doesn’t. We have no evidence one way or the other so at the present time all we can do is to make a Best Guess based on what we do know. Or, ‘How did the Universe begin?’ It’s here so it had to come from somewhere. But how did this work? Again, we don’t know – yet. The tantalising aspect of such questions is that they do have answers but we don’t know what they are.

The genre of Popular Science has had a real surge of interest recently so I think that this is a timely topic. There’s been a lot of science in the media and this is a good thing. By and large, science works. The remote control turns on the TV; antibiotics kill bacteria; eclipses happen as predicted, etc. But there’s lots of pseudoscience as well, which is a bad thing. Why do so many people still believe in things for which there is clearly no good evidence that they work. You wouldn’t convict a suspect because he looked like a villain – you would expect to see some evidence that he actually committed the crime.

It’s certainly not my intention to upset anyone, and we’re all entitled to our own beliefs and opinions. It is my belief however, that people should weigh up evidence before accepting fantastic ideas, and the more fantastic the idea, the better the evidence needs to be. For example, if someone told me that they could foretell the future, I would certainly ask for some good evidence before accepting their claim.

Some older readers may remember football pools and a man called Horace Batchelor. The ‘pools’ were the forerunner of the National Lottery where punters could win thousands of pounds by predicting the results of football matches. Horace Batchelor developed his infra-draw method and advertised it widely on Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s and 1960s. Listeners were asked to send him their stake money and he would bet this on the pools according to his system. He would take a percentage of every win but took nothing if the bet lost. In his heyday, he was receiving as many as 5,000 cash stakes every day. He eventually won about £12 million for himself and was for a time banned from betting by some pools companies. This of course only served to increase his popularity.

So how did he do it? Could he predict the match results? No. It was a simple mathematical system. He received so much stake money that he could afford to cover very many, and in some cases all, of the possible outcomes. This meant that he often had winning lines but as far as his punters were concerned, their individual chances of winning were no better than if they had placed he bets themselves. He took his commission from the winners and sent them the balance. He invested no money himself.

The modern day equivalent would be to advertise a lottery-winning scheme and place the money sent in to cover every one of the approximately 14 million combinations. You’d be guaranteed a win every week.

Science is everywhere, and it works. It’s best that we adopt a cautious approach before believing that all sorts of amazing things that appear to defy science are actually possible. Everything isn’t always what it seems.

Nottingham University Press In Collaboration with Science Reviews 2000

2011-08-09T03:48:00.000-07:00

From July 2011, Nottingham University Press (NUP) and Science Reviews 2000 will be working together on a joint venture to promote each other’s services. Both companies’ titles target similar markets in the academic field and it was felt this was a natural fit for collaboration.

As part of this collaboration all six of Science Reviews Journals are now featured on NUP’s e-commerce site, available to purchase directly for one year print-only subscriptions. Links are also available to access on-line purchases/subscriptions. Science Reviews will be featuring NUP’s titles and services within their Journals and also online.

Sara, SR2000, comments, “Finding a partner for our Journals was an important task for us. NUP offered us a great fit for our company, as well as offering a high quality service and a good business relationship.”

Sarah Keeling, NUP, comments: “Working together has been a rewarding and informative experience as this is a brand new business model for NUP. We are delighted to be expanding our range of experience and hope to expand more in this area in the near future.”

About Science Reviews 2000
Science Reviews 2000 Ltd is an independent, family owned academic publisher founded by Dr Peter and Professor Margaret Farago. It currently publishes six Journal titles: Chemical Speciation and Bioavailability, Science Progress, Avian Biology Research, Journal of Chemical Research, Materials at High Temperatures and Progress in Reaction Kinetics and Mechanism. Together with its international team of editors and advisory board members, Science Reviews 2000 Ltd continues with its primary objective of providing affordable world class information to all scientific disciplines in both industry and academia. See website for more information.

About NUP
Nottingham University Press is a dynamic and rapidly expanding independent university press - and has gained international recognition as a publisher of high quality scientific and technical publications.

From humble beginnings with the publication of "Recent Developments in Pig Nutrition 2" in August 1992 and "Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition 1993" in June of 1993, NUP has grown into an internationally recognised University Press with representation in over 90 countries. NUP specialises in the publication of Conference proceedings, alongside its normal publishing programme. See our website for more information about NUP.

The Excitement and Perils of Scuba Diving from Author Marlow Anderson

2011-07-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

I was not in the country when my personal copies of “The Physics of Scuba Diving” arrived in Colorado from Nottingham University Press. It seems only appropriate that I was on a scuba diving trip with my wife Audrey at the time. We were spending a week diving in Tobago, in the extreme south east corner of the Caribbean.

We had an exceptionally nice trip. The dive operation was excellent, the coral reefs were marvellously healthy, the currents were fun, and the fish life was abundant. As a great bonus, we had two dives featuring extended manta ray encounters. Manta rays can be curious and playful with divers, and on both these dives a lone manta made repeated circular passes to check us all out.

We were happy to see that lionfish had not yet made it to this far corner of the Caribbean. Introduced into the Atlantic by humans in the 1990s, this spiny Pacific fish has continued to spread inexorably in the Caribbean, since they are prolific, and have no natural predators in the Caribbean. As explained in this article. They are forcing out native fish by eating them, or starving them out. When we dived in Belize in January, we saw dozens of them on a single dive.

By chance we were in Tobago when a rare fatal diving accident occurred at a nearby resort. This had a large impact on the small local diving community. Reportedly this accident was the result of exceedingly unsafe dive profiles. Recreational diving is an extremely safe sport, but only if the diver follows the kind of safe recommendations all training agencies promote; the science behind those safe profiles is explained in detail in “The Physics of Scuba Diving”. These days this is easy to do: every diver should dive with a good dive computer, and understand how it works and what it is telling you. For lots of great information about safe diving, and help in case an accident does still occur, you should look at the Divers Alert Network website.

Audrey and I often encounter people who are surprised we scuba dive, considering that we live in land-locked Colorado. But actually Colorado ranks high per capita for scuba divers among the states of the United States. I think this has to do with the active outdoorsy nature of the Colorado population. And in most parts of the country, to do any warm-water diving, you have to get on an airplane anyway!

Meanwhile, we’re now looking forward to our next dive adventure – this time in Turks & Caicos.

Marlow Anderson

The Physics of Cricket Media Links

2011-07-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

Mark Kidger, author of the NUP title 'The Physics of Cricket', has been widely promoting his book through radio interviews and magazine articles. Click on the following links to listen in:

BBC Radio 4 - Material World ( Thursday 21st July 2011): Listen Live or Material World Podcast. Interview starts at 20:31.

The Cricketer - Interview with Kevin Hand (Tuesday 19th July 2011): Kevin's Podcasts

Please get in touch for further information on this title.

NUP

Mark Kidger "Author of Physics of Cricket" explains his love of Cricket

2011-07-04T06:14:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with astronomy at about the same age that I fell in love with cricket. There the paths diverged: quickly it became obvious to my parents and to my teachers at school that I had an aptitude for science and, almost as rapidly, they discovered that I had no aptitude at all for cricket. I loved playing cricket. I loved watching it and, when my total inability to be any use to my primary school side on the field of play became too great a handicap for me to be picked, I followed the side around the west country as its scorer.

Probably it was those happy days, many of them at weekends, which imbued me with a deep love of the statistical side of the game. Cricket is a deeply statistical game and statisticians are an essential element of it. You only have to remember how well loved Bill Frindall, Test Match scorer and statistician was: when people called him “The Bearded Wonder” it was because he inspired admiration and awe among colleagues and listeners. You don’t need to delve deep into cricket statistics though to find that they are often sadly abused numbers, not that Bill Frindall ever profaned them by calculating averages for a two match series, or taking the averages for the Sunday League seriously. No, he was way above that. To get Bill Frindall excited Brian Johnson or John Arlott, or Christopher Martin-Jenkins had to ask him how many fifties had been scored at Leeds on the first day of a Test match in June by red-headed left-handers! And, of course, he always had the answer.

For the more profane cricket fans statistics in cricket means run rates and averages. Sadly though, the latter especially are frequently thrown around like confetti by people who have no idea what they mean. When a particularly barbarous misuse of statistics is questioned, a frequent response is “you can prove anything with numbers” or, perhaps, to quote the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics”. The fact is though that if you use them properly, aware of their limitations, you are far more likely to prove the truth than a lie. The fact that people can get aware with murder using statistics is more an indictment of the way that such numbers are rarely scrutinized properly and misuse is just accepted as a fact of life. You cannot fairly and reasonably compare the averages even of two players with simultaneous careers if they did not play in the same conditions against a similar level of opposition, let alone say, Dennis Compton with Rahul Dravid – two great players who played in different epochs, with different conditions, a different style of play and, who played, largely, in different continents!

Increasingly though statistics and numbers are impinging on other elements of the game. The speed gun is now a part of cricketing life. We all love seeing a bowler rack up speeds over 150km/h on the speed gun and largely do not question what we see. Just get a pencil and paper or, if you must, a calculator and work out what that speed means. 150km/h (93.2mph, if you prefer Imperial units) is 41.7m/s. The batsman is standing under 20 metres from the bowler and the ball will bounce perhaps 8 metres in front of him so, we would think that the batsman has perhaps 0.2s to react to the bounce of the ball. Most normal mortals will barely start to move in 0.2s, let alone be able to intercept the path of the ball with deadly accuracy with a small piece of wood. Thank heavens for physics! Otherwise batting would be even more impossible than the Gloucestershire top order makes it look. Batsman should breathe a prayer of thanks for air resistance and the rather small coefficient of restitution of a ball impacting on the pitch, which slows the ball enough that the contest between bat and speeding ball is usually reasonably even. Even so, it is a moot point, even if the ball has slowed to “only” 80km/h when it reaches the batsman, whether or not the average spectator would be able to lay bat on ball, or even start to react if he were to change places with the batsman that he is criticizing and face the bowler himself.

The ball itself is a fascinating piece of technology and one rarely appreciated by spectators or even, at times, cricketers. How often do you hear that a side has “misread the pitch”, looking for pace and bounce that just are not there? Yet no one actually points a finger at another potentially guilty party: the ball itself. You sometimes hear tennis players complain about a batch of balls feeling different, or not bouncing as high as they are used to, yet the quality standard for the bounce of a tennis ball is four times as tough as it is for a cricket ball. One new ball can bounce far higher than another in the same conditions, yet both can be acceptable according to the quality standard. Similarly, you can have a significant range of size, weight and hence density and composition of balls, even when they satisfy the stringent standards of the ICC. As a cricket ball is a natural product, it is inevitable that no two balls can never ever behave in exactly the same way.

You can find fascinating physics wherever you look on a cricket pitch. Not just the ball. A cricket bat has fascinating similarities to a musical instrument in its behaviour and a fine bat maker will tune a bat as well as Stradivarius ever tuned a violin. The science of ballistics, with a little help from mechanics and aerodynamics, determines whether that lofted shot from Kevin Pietersen is going to cross the boundary rope safely and be cheered as a big six, or drop conveniently into the hands of the fielder waiting for it just inside the field of play. And, bowling is simply applied fluid dynamics. A bowler who is “making the ball talk”, is simply applying fluid dynamics more successful than the batsman is applying mechanics to the process of hitting it. A successful bowler will apply laminar and turbulent flow as well as any laboratory physicist can. Even spin bowlers will sometimes demonstrate a thorough grounding in this field, although they will also express a scholarly interest in the Magnus effect and the coefficient of friction of leather on a compressed earth/grass composite.

Of course, probably the most controversial application of physics to the modern game of cricket is in adjudicating umpiring decisions. So much heat gets expended on umpiring aids such as Hawkeye, Snicko and HotSpot and of the iniquities of slow motion replays of critical incidents. In some ways cricket is the last of the luddites. Tennis has used Hawkeye for years without its accuracy being called into question and the precursor of Hawkeye was around the tennis courts thirty years ago, yet put Hawkeye on a cricket pitch and suddenly everyone wants to second-guess it. Forget the fact that Hawkeye showed at the World Cup that umpires get far more marginal decisions right than they do wrong, you cast doubt on it and, often, the human umpire too who is doing this damndest to get things right when over the course of a day there may be an average of one appeal per over. You either accept human frailty and the fact that even the best umpire will make the occasional mistake, or you accept that a computer can predict the trajectory of the ball, warts and all. Even when the physical principals are as simple as HotSpot – friction between bat and ball heats the bat, which then radiates black body radiation at around ten microns, which is detected by a sensitive thermal imaging camera – you can find incidents that can cast doubt on its veracity and validity. There will always be some uncertainly in marginal cases and no technology that humans can invent will ever be able to eliminate that uncertainty completely.

Nottingham University Press Launches an eBook Program

2011-06-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

The eBooks are hosted on MPS Limited's eContent platform

London - Nottingham University Press (NUP) launches its eBook program tomorrow using an eContent hosting platform developed by MPS Limited, a Macmillan company. The university press's eBook program starts with 16 selected titles.

NUP launched the program to increase the range of formats in which their customers can read their books. By making the eBooks available to buy directly from their website, the press hopes to further strengthen their relationship with their readers, who will not need to go to a third party retailer to make their purchases. NUP plans to create EPUB versions of the eBooks later in the year, once the new EPUB 3 standard has been finalized.

The books are hosted on a customized version of MPS's easy-to-use eContent platform which allows readers to browse and search inside the book before purchasing. The platform also enables NUP to promote their books using widgets and social media, a vital channel in today's connected world.

Rajiv Seth, MD and CEO of MPS Limited, comments: "We are delighted to have been able to support NUP's eBook program and look forward to even closer collaboration in the future as eBooks move to the mainstream."

"After discussions with MPS, we liked both their enthusiasm and knowledge of their subject. It was easy to take the next step and invite them to work with us. We look forward to collaborating further with MPS in the future," said Emily Milsom At NUP.

About MPS Limited

In today's digital world, content is becoming ever more sophisticated and increasingly inseparable from technology. MPS Limited, a Macmillan company company with over 35 years of relevant experience serving major publishers worldwide, is helping the world navigate this new market by creating high-quality solutions designed to transform and enrich content for print, online, and mobile media. For more information, visit: www.macmillanpublishingsolutions.com

About NUP

Nottingham University Press is proud to be a part of the University of Nottingham, which provides a truly international educational program, inspiring its students, producing world-leading research, and benefitting the communities around its campuses in the UK, China, and Malaysia. Since its inception in 1993, NUP has grown to embrace new technology in the production of books, journals, and e-books. It is renowned for the quality of conference proceedings produced on behalf of many corporate clients and is internationally recognized in many genres. For more information, visit www.nup.com.

New Breed of “Planet Hunting” Astrobiologists Quickly Discovering We are Probably Not Alone in the Universe

2011-06-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

For thousands of years, mankind believed the earth was the center of the universe, and all the objects (sun, moon, stars) we could see in the sky revolved around us. While a Polish astronomer named Nicholas Copernicus managed almost 450 years ago to demote the earth as being the “center” of the universe, much of the world’s population continued to believe earth might still be totally unique in being the only place life could exist.

In the 1950s, many astronomers began endorsing the theory that our solar system was the result of an extremely close encounter between our sun and another star that accidently wandered into our neighborhood. While the two stars did not physically collide they were thought to have come close enough that a cloud of debris was torn away from the sun which later condensed to form our planetary system. Although our scientists were well aware that our universe contains large numbers of other galaxies each containing incredible numbers of stars, as late as 1995 mankind’s egocentric nature still convinced many of us that our sun might be, if not the only one, at least one of the very few stars which have planets circling it. In that year, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz at the University of Geneva in Switzerland spotted a star in their telescope that appeared to have an absolutely miniscule wobble in its motion through space. While they could not see it, the scientists measuring instruments indicated that this small wobble was caused by a planet that was gravitationally tugging on the star as it circled it. Mankind suddenly realized that ours is not the only planetary system in the universe – there was now at least one other one out there. This discovery of the first “exoplanet” orbiting another star triggered a huge wave of excitement among the world’s astronomers.

Astronomers started looking for more exoplanets, and more exoplanets they quickly found! By the year 2000 astronomers had discovered 40 other such worlds, and by 2010, this number had grown to almost 500, with some stars having families of planets similar to our own solar system. At first, the only planets that could be found were giant gas planets (like our own Jupiter or larger) simply because they produced larger tugging effects on their home stars that were more detectable. As these new “planet hunters” (as they were now whimsically labeled by the news media) improved their detection techniques they rapidly began finding smaller and smaller exoplanets that produced even smaller but still detectable tugging effects. In the last few years the planet hunters have started finding “super-earths” that, in some cases, are only about two or three times larger than earth, with some possibly orbiting in their home star’s “habitable zones” where water and life friendly surface conditions may exist (Figure 1).

Fig 1.

Until the spring of 2009, the biggest obstacle to finding small earth-like planets circling other stars was that all of our telescopes were earth-bound which forced us to deal with a dirty and turbulent atmosphere that made it difficult to see the really small stellar wobbles produced by the smaller exoplanets. On March 6 of 2009, this all changed when NASA launched (Figure 2) the first space telescope that would be totally dedicated to detecting exoplanets. This Kepler mission (named after a famous 17th century mathematician and astronomer) started using a new method for detecting exoplanets that was even more sensitive than searching for wobbling stars. Astronomers now began looking for extremely small reductions in the total light coming from a star that occurs when an exoplanet moves in front of it and blocks some of its light making it appear slightly dimmer. This effect is similar (but much smaller) to what happens when the moon moves in front of and “eclipses” our sun. Because astronomers now did not have to deal with the interference of the atmosphere they could actually see reductions in a star’s light as small as 1/100 of 1 percent that would indicate the presence of exoplanets as small or smaller than our earth.

Fig 2.

The Kepler telescope, in just two short years, has now made the “explosion” of exoplanet discoveries made earlier by ground-based telescopes look like the wimpy “pop” of a small firecracker! As of February, 2011, Kepler (Figure 3) has discovered a total of 1,235 possible new exoplanets. However, since NASA currently has Kepler only looking at one very small sector of the sky that is only about 1/400 of the total sky area that is visible from earth, it is quite likely that the 1,235 exoplanets so far detected by Kepler might be a gross under-estimate of the total numbers that might be detectable if Kepler were able to look at the total area of the sky! Thus, exoplanets may be as common as “grains of sand in, if not all, at least many of the earth’s beaches”! Of course, If our own solar system is typical, only one out of 9 of these planets may be life friendly, at least for our familiar carbon-based form of life.

Fig 3.

However, at the end of the 20th century, the astrobiologists had also started making other even more startling discoveries that now suggests that the form of life (based on the carbon atom and water) that exists on earth may not be the only form of life that can occur in the universe. Our scientists have now discovered that life was actually able to first originate on our planet almost four billion years ago when our environment was so hot and hostile that no known forms of living critters were believed to be possible. The discovery of these “extremophiles” (which scientists call “lovers of extreme environments”), whose descendents are still alive today and thriving all over our world, now suggests that life may be far more flexible and resilient than previously thought possible and might easily evolve on other planets that have environments that are totally different from those found on earth. Other exotic forms of life that are based on completely different chemistries from ours may be able to evolve on other worlds in the universe and may actually outnumber our own carbon-based form of life.

Thus, with the beginning of the new 21st century our scientists, while not yet finding any definitive evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life (life on other worlds), may be close to discovering that such alien life is far more common out there than we would have dared imagine just a few short years ago. The incredible new discoveries of our “planet hunting” astrobiologists will definitely make the remainder of the 21st century a very exciting time for our scientists as well as a “profound eye-opener” for all the rest of us.

Authored by Jerry Cranford - NUP Author

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Figure 1 – Shows an artist’s drawing of a small exoplanet that some astronomers now believe could be inhabited by carbon- based life similar to ours. This planet is one of 6 exoplanets that orbits a small red dwarf star (called Gliese 581) that is only 20 light years from us or 117,313,920,000,000 miles away. (Image credit: ESO)

Figure 2 – Shows the liftoff of the NASA Delta rocket carrying the Kepler planet hunting space telescope into high earth orbit. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Figure 3 – Shows an artist’s drawing of the Kepler telescope hard at work in space looking for evidence of exoplanets. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)
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eBooks on NUP

2011-05-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

NUP are proud to announce the introduction of eBooks to our offerings.

Please see our website for the chosen eBooks.

NUP

EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT.......

2011-05-26T08:54:00.001-07:00

Next week Nottingham University Press should have some very exciting news for you all........ stay tuned!!

NUP

Top 10 NUP Book's of all Time

2011-05-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

As a special feature, we are counting down the 10 best selling NUP title's of all time:

10) Recent Advances in Pet Nutrition - 978-1-904761-11-2

D.K. Laue and L.A. Tucker (Eds) £24.99

This book covers the current state of our knowledge in companion animal nutrition as well as exploring the all-important issue of how these developments are conveyed to pet owners through marketing.

9) Redefining Mineral Nutrition - 978-1-904761-30-3 £14.99

J.A. Taylor-Pickard and L.A. Tucker (Eds)

Featuring papers from some of the world's leading authorities, the aim of this volume is to re-examine the current status of mineral recommendations and to look at how minerals are applied in feeds for poultry, pigs and ruminants. Re-Defining Mineral Nutrition is aimed at nutritionists and animal producers as well as students and researchers studying animal and applied biological sciences.

8) Acidifiers in Animal Nutrition - 978-1-904761-40-2 £25.00

Christian Luckstadt

A guide for feed preservation and acidification to promote animal performance. This book provides an overview on the use of acidifiers in animal nutrition and their beneficial effects on livestock and aquaculture. It contains a compilation of papers from research institutes and the industry worldwide related to that topic. It is hoped that further scientific development in this area will boost discussions on future research, leading to more in-depth knowledge on the mode of action and benefits of acidifiers in animal nutrition.

7) Poultry Diseases Influenced by Gastrointestinal Health - 978-1-907284-15-1 £30.00

Gino Lorenzoni (Eds)

In this book poultry diseases that are directly related to the gastrointestinal tract, as well as diseases that are not directly but that could be influenced by the intestinal health are covered. In addition, the impact of human pathogens harboured by poultry is also discussed. As a background to understand the covered topics, basic insights in poultry anatomy, plysiology and immunology are given. The book also contains pictures that aid in the description of poultry anatomy, digestive physiology and poultry diseases.

6) Managing Gut Health - 978-1-904761-45-7 £9.99

Tobias Steiner (Eds)

This book highlights the most important categories of natural growth promoters: Acidifiers, probiotics, prebiotics, synbiotics, feed enzymes, phytogenics and immune stimulants. Particular focus is placed on their characterisation, mode of action and potential benefits in different animal species, including pigs, poultry, fish, shrimp and ruminants.

5) Phytogenics In Animal Nutrition - 978-1-904761-71-6 £35.00

Tobias Steiner (Eds)

This compendium represents a review of existing knowledge, as well as a basis for future research and development for scientists and the feed industry in order to develop efficacious phytogenic preparations for animal nutrition.

4) Selenium In Nutrition and Health - 978-1-904761-16-7 Out of Print

Peter F Surai

This book provides information about selenium as an important part of integrated antioxidant systems in animal and human bodies responsible for maintaining health. It contains practical advice in relation to effective usage of selenium supplements. It also combines fundamental information on selenium biochemistry and metabolism. It also presents the most recent findings, unresolved puzzles and future directions for selenium research.

3) Mycotoxin Blue Book - 978-1-904761-19-8 £11.99

D Diaz (Ed)

Once thought to be only a problem in tropical regions, moulds and the mycotoxins they produce have wide-ranging economic impact on animal agriculture on every continent of the globe. Mould growth robs feed nutritive value and reduces intake, which lowers efficiency. Mycotoxins, even when present at levels previously considered 'trace', have negative effects on performance and health, particularly in the context of today's more highly productive modern livestock genetics.

2) The Alcohol Textbook - 5th Edition - 978-1-904761-65-5 £85.00

WM Ingledew Et Al (Eds)

This substantially revised and updated 5th edn. of this bestseller makes useful and vital information generally accessible for all sectors of the fuel and distilled beverage alcohol industry. It concentrates on processing technology, blending plant science, chemical engineering, microbiology, biochemistry, and chemical engineering with unit processing of alcohol from substrate selection and processing through fermentation to the purification of ethanol and the coproducts distillers grain and carbon dioxide.

AND finally our best selling title of all time..........

1) Writing and Presenting Scientific Papers - 2nd Edition - 978-1-897676-12-7 £22.50

B. Malmfors, P. Garnsworthy & M. Grossman

The aim of this book is to provide guidelines for preparing papers and presentations so that your message can be transmitted clearly and concisely to the reader or listener. Techniques for improving your writing, literature searching and training students in communication are discussed. In this revised edition a more topics have been added, such as electronic submission of manuscripts and writing research proposals.

Coming soon.....

Top 10 of 2011 so far......

Book Feature on 'From Dying Stars to the Birth of Life' by Jerry Cranford.

NUP

2011 - A Year of Change in Ebooks?

2011-02-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

Things are started to buzz now; you can read it, see it, and even hear about it! The exciting part of the year has begun as we eagerly await 2011’s surprises.

First of all comes the launch of Google E-Books into the US, with intended further roll out this year. We’ve done the sign-ups via our US Agent and the books are now uploading. If it lives up to its hype, then we will follow the UK launch closely!

However new innovations like Google E-Books, don’t come without their quirks. Unfortunately there are still many questions about pricing. Issues in Google E-Books come from things such as the Indie Booksellers, who are still charging twice or three times as much as Google and Amazon. At the moment it seems a bookseller can sell at their own price but with such pressure to lower prices, will the publishers be able to resist and retain control over their own content?

Although Google is putting in place various technologies to limit access to their E-books, is it perhaps a flawed ideal as it is alleged in some blogs that Google is leaning towards sharing content between devices. This means they would like less DRM to be imposed on each title. This kind of DRM may not always be at odds with popular publisher opinion but certainly is at the moment, with Publishers needing to control the sharing of their content. Thus protecting their revenue income. DRM is definitely something that needs watching…

Another interesting possibility this year is the announcement of a new version of Epub – Epub 3. This version will still be back-compatible with Epub 2 but will actually have better formatting options. This is particularly worthwhile for those in the academic area of publishing because that area tends to contain more tables, pictures and artwork and the re-flowable text will ruin the formatting and therefore ruin the publications quality and lower the value.

Re-Flowable text however is a necessity to e-reader devices, as each device needs to re-flow the text to fit their screen, which is what Epub does. This leaves Academic publishers in a catch 22 situation, with no way of supplying good quality eBook versions of their work.

This is why epub3 is so potentially impressive. It will mean that academic publishers will be able to easily create E-Books for their complicated works meaning a huge influx of new materials could enter the market. For more technical information about this potential new version of ePub, take a look at the new Epub 3 specification Overview Draft.

Lastly London Book Fair is fast approaching. We would be delighted to see you on our stand. (N409)

Please pay us a visit!

Emily - NUP

The value of University Press Publishing

2011-01-10T01:43:00.000-08:00

From discussions with various university press publishers during Frankfurt Book Fair week in October 2010 I have noted many criteria which make a University Press stand out. The most important one is the requirement for Peer Reviews. In an address given at the inaugural AEUP meeting in Frankfurt, Marike Schipper from Leuven University Press, Belgium summed up the role of a university press. She defined a University Press as “A publishing organisation belonging to or clearly linked to a university, a research institute or a learned society where publications are subject to peer review.”

She went on to say: [extracts and précis]

“Some University Presses publish books, others are into Journals; most use paper, but many publish in various electronic ways. We acquire, read and select manuscripts or articles, we edit and proofread them, we design covers and layout, have them printed or produced, and we promote, distribute and sell them.

How do we therefore distinguish ourselves from other publishers, scholarly or other?

The relationship between a university press and an academic institution takes on many shapes and forms, and it is very hard to define the concept of ‘university press.’ The fact that we share a distinct and formal relationship with a parent or partner institution sets us apart from any other scholarly publisher that does not have such a relationship. In many ways, a university press operates as an extension of its parent or partner institution and is therefore a key player in a more general network – including learned societies, scholarly associations and research libraries – that facilitates the distribution of scholarly knowledge and research. It is this connection to a larger framework that has several implications for a university press.

Our formal connection to the scholarly community and our commitment to disseminate academic research implies that the main criteria for publishing a manuscript are the scholarly content of the work. In order to assess the quality of this content, university presses rely on an extensive network of editorial board and/or external reviewers who advise the publisher on what to publish and what not. This peer review process is at the heart of university press publishing. It means that important but highly specialist research written for a small group of peers in less common topics which are being ignored by the larger commercial publishers may still have a chance of being published with a university press. And it is also what we are good at: to publish specialist research and to bring it to an international audience of academics, librarians and individual readers across the world.

It would be a bit naïve to think that university presses do not at all look at a title’s market potential. Even the university presses that are fully committed to the Open Access model need to take the numbers into account and calculate possible profits and loss. The sales potential is in most cases subsidiary to the quality of content because not all our titles need to be commercially viable per sé. This is what sets us apart from other scholarly publishers that need to make a profit to satisfy their shareholders. Our shareholders are the academic community and to satisfy them we publish books because of their scholarly, intellectual and creative merits, even if (but not because!) their scope and readership is small or sometimes tiny.

Within the University Press “family”, there are various business models to be found. Some are fully embedded into the university, whilst others may be set up as a Foundation or a Limited company, sometimes with the academic partner occupying the Board or as the main shareholder and still others operate independent from their academic partner. Therefore it is apparent that it is our strong relationship with, and our commitment to the academic community in order to pursue our common goal: the dissemination of scholarly knowledge.

The world of scholarly publishing is changing rapidly. Electronic media is challenging classic business models of selling paper content and the internet opens up many exciting ways of distributing and acquiring information. Academics and researchers are now in constant contact with their peers, exchanging ideas and information. Funding organisations more and more request that publicly funded research is publicly accessible, for free. Open access has become a serious alternative to traditional publishing models and libraries are looking for these alternatives to expensive packet deals. The internet seems to have the answer to many of our problems, but at the same time it may seem to make the intervention of a publisher somewhat redundant. What is the added value of a publisher if every person with access to the web can publish whatever he wants online and expects to get his information for free? And it is a good question? One we will have to find an answer to if we are to stay in business. Any publisher, scholarly or other, will have to [re]invent its role in future decades. Will people even continue to read books or will we all have an iPad in our suitcases by next year’s holiday?

More than ever, University Presses need to work with their parent institutions to confirm and underline their value in the process of disseminating scholarly knowledge. They need to prove their added value as quality controllers and help their readers, the academic community, to distinguish serious, innovative and valuable scholarly content from all the rest that is out there.

In a time where the internet has become the largest and most democratic distributor of information, the university press’ commitment to peer review and the assessment of new manuscripts is more important than ever.”

In my new role as a Board member of the Association of European University Presses, I am fully committed to using this new avenue to share information and best practices and work together to increase our presence on a European level. By joining forces we can improve the visibility of our university presses and make sure our commitment to scholarly publishing is recognised by academic institutions, potential authors, readers and buyers alike. This may include shared stands – Europe-wide and doing joint promotion of our publishing programmes and our titles to academics and libraries.

What Marike has described above is not an idealistic view, but a serious statement about the classical role of a university press. Peer reviews and editorial boards feature heavily in the activities of a classical UP but NUP must consider carefully its role and also consider the commercial applications presently enjoyed. Currently this includes corporate involvement and books which contain scientific content from outside the academic community.

We should also consider membership of the OAPEN access initiative:

More information on OAPEN and the Library is available at www.oapen.org (OAPEN Library) or http://www.oapen.org/project (background information).

Ros Webb

Ebooks: Taking a leap of Faith

2010-12-29T02:31:00.000-08:00

As many as you may know we already feature e-books but previously it has been through ebook aggregators. We felt this was a necessary first step to make sure we didn't rush in and make common mistakes.

After this booming year in the publishing industry, we felt that it was time to venture into the waters of retail e-books. At the moment we distribute through Gardners, IPG, 123Doc and Dawsonera.com. These are all ebook/library distributors. We also now sell our ebooks from retail websites. These are Airiti and PaperC. However both retailers operate outside of the UK, which is why we are looking to expand to the UK market.

To solve this we looked at a number of company's that offered Digital Publishing Solutions at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair. We decided on and started negotiations with MPS (MacMillan Publishing Solutions).

'MPS is the global leader of high-quality publishing solutions that cover every stage of the author-to-reader publishing process.'

MPS will enable NUP to sell its own ebooks. A huge benefit to working with MPS is that is will allow us to directly sell our ebooks to our customers instead of having to work with a number of 3rd parties. This move should ultimately gives us more power but will also allow us to work with more seasoned experts, especially ones who can help us with approaching this new market.

We look forward to seeing the results of this project. Please check out our website for new information - we look forward to seeing you there.

A Step into the unknown......

2010-12-13T03:39:00.000-08:00

In the recent months since the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nup has been making several efforts to expand its business offerings. One huge improvement is the search and discovery programmes NUP has taken on board. These programmes are designed to increase book discovery and create book citation indexes for our titles. Thus forth enhancing and improving the discovery of our titles.

The two companies that we are currently working with is Thomson Reuters 'Web of Science' and Bowker's:

The company Thomson Reuters is already fairly well known for its Web of Science Programme, this has already been highly successful using Journals. We will be working with them on creating citation indexes for all of our titles. To explain more clearly, a citation index is a collection of all the cited references found in the footnotes and bibliographies of our titles. Researchers, readers and students can then use the citation index to quickly and efficiently identify the most relevant information for their work i.e. they would be able to look at the index for one of our titles and quickly identify whether the information within the chosen text was appropriate for their research. Benefits for us from this includes increased visibility of our titles, accelerated discovery of those titles and increase usage. It will also increase the visibility of our business (NUP) and can attract authors and researchers from around the world.

Bowker's offers a slightly different service being a search and discovery product. The company is developing data mining and profiling applications designed to enhance book discovery. This specifically will be able to produce academic book profiles. These profiles will include word and word-group relevancies such as keywords, as well as information about genre and time periods. This enriched meta-data about our titles enables Bowker's products (these being Books in Print and Syndetic Solutions - Bowler's online library catalog enrichment service) to provide better book discoverability to libraries and therefore our end users.

By using these new services NUP can maximise visibility of its titles especially within the academic market, which is a key market of many of NUP's more technical titles. It also makes it easier for them to find, which in turn makes them more likely to be used. This can lead to sales of titles, as well as increasing the visibility of the Press as a company and of the brand that is NUP.

Our Daily Meat - A Feature on the Butchery Trade during WWII

2010-10-27T05:27:00.001-07:00

In preparation for NUP's new title 'Shoulder of Mutton Field' by Desmond Whyman. NUP has teamed up with Best of British magazine for a feature about the history of meat rationing in the UK during war time:

"Valuable lessons about rationing were learned in WWI and by 1938, the country was prepared for war. Christmas 1939 saw adverts for well stocked butchers mixed with those for air raid shelters. The first Christmas at war ended on an optimistic note – perhaps things would not be too bad. Then the ‘phony war’ ended suddenly, and the deprivations of real war became apparent.

The man responsible for feeding the nation was Frederick James Marquis,1st Baron Woolton, a former MD of a department store. Woolton rapidly became a household name and his staff would number 39,000. His principle was to ration nothing, however scarce, until there was enough to go round and then to ensure that this ration was always honoured.

Now the meat industry was completely subject to directives from the Government: all wholesale meat markets were closed and slaughterhouses were nationalised. Retail butchers were allocated quantities of meat equal to their sales just prior to the beginning of the war.

Meat rationing
On Monday January 8th, 1940, food rationing began. Notices stated ‘Sold Out’, ‘Only One Each’, ‘Awaiting Delivery’, ‘Coupons Required’ and ‘Waste Not Want Not’, and ration books were essential. Marlene Crilly in the book Blitz Kids: ‘We were dug out from (the) debris with no more than cuts and bruises… but Mum insisted on (finding) our ration books… it took the neighbours some time and… physical force to stop her’.

On the first day, bacon, ham and a few weeks later in March, meat, were rationed by price and then by weight. The average allowance was seven ounces of meat and two ounces of corned beef a week. Thomas Buttling spent ‘all morning cutting up 6lb tins of corn beef for the customers’ few pennies-worth each’. Imported meat came in pre-boned to save space and as a result even butchers, let alone their customers, sometimes struggled to recognise the relevant joint. Sausages, offal, poultry, fish, rabbits, game, goat, and horse meat were un-rationed, but subject to supply and price control. Dried beef and mutton in powder or compressed blocks was imported for makers of pies, cooked meat dishes and restaurants.

Like Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army, butchers had to be careful to avoid confrontations. A hostile crowd of women customers attacked a butcher who accidentally weighed a customer’s corn beef with two sheets of greaseproof paper…

Dodgy meat
At the start of the war, bacon was considered vital to morale. This saw the introduction of ‘macon’, a cured or smoked mutton substitute. One butcher said: “It sold but was not popular,” and by 1940, production ceased. The legal wartime content of sausages and sausage meat was 37% meat, 7% soya and 55% filler or National flour with added water and seasoning – but sausages were often rumoured to contain horse meat and sawdust. Another (extremely unpopular) item, whale meat – tinned or frozen – was virtually indigestible, strong-smelling and not for the faint-hearted. Pig, rabbit, goat, and poultry clubs were organised. Pigs were kept in makeshift sties in towns and cities. The vast wild rabbit population became an asset during the war. Special trains delivered thousands of rabbits to London each day. Diners were also confronted with meatless dishes – mock duck, goose, rissoles, venison and others. As the war dragged on there was a mass exodus of customers from heavily bombed areas and many shops were destroyed or unusable and old mobile butchers or converted lorries were used."

Shoulder of Mutton Field by Desmond Whyman
(Nottingham University Press, soft-back, £25-00, ISBN 978 1 907284 73 1)
There was a time when customers visited the butcher’s shop three or four times a week. That’s no longer the case but there was more to the retail butcher’s trade than a striped apron and two lamb chops – as this 144-page book explains, using Camden as an example.

To register Interest for this title, please click here.

Best of British Magazine

Best of British magazine features nostalgia of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Alongside features contributed by experts, it is a major source of first hand reader accounts of their day to day lives, work and military experiences in these periods. The magazine is published monthly and also includes the best of Britain today, with extensive events listings and visits to interesting people and places.

Please visit the Best of British website for more information.

Digital Academic Publishing

2010-09-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Emily recently attended a day conference for the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research entitled ‘Digital Academic Publishing’. This was hosted by Birmingham City University.

The day included a talk from Intellect’s chairman, Masoud Yazdani, who felt the E-publishing situation was highly comparable to the situation faced recently by the music industry regarding the illegal downloading of music versus buying the file. Masoud felt that as publishers, we need to become more involved in the development of new delivery methods for our material before non-publishers introduce a new way of publishing that only benefits themselves and their readers.

The day also featured a talk from research student Rob Horrocks, who had recently interviewed a number of UK Publishers about their concerns for online publishing. The results from these interviews indicated concern regarding the expense of making old texts available electronically. This refers mainly to purchase other fonts relative to other languages, which can prove expensive. He also mentioned the issue of producing these texts in so many different formats cause publishers to still favour the one style of PDF. The reader however would ideally like features such as resizeability etc and the choice of the different formats, leaving the industry in a small stand off.

Other issues brought to light in the breakout talk sessions included problems with references that are caused by reflow ability (as this causes pages to be numbered differently on every device) and therefore questions the indexing of these files. This article explains the issue in better detail for those interested. Questions about creating online communities were voiced. Many attendees noted how difficult it was to create a thriving community from one book etc and to keep it alive and kicking, whereas existing communities can hold more social influence. It was mentioned that social media could be used to the publishers’ advantage i.e. companion sites with additional materials for texts, but online communities were the key to tapping into the pool of new opinion leaders.

One delegate posed the question that if the music industry now makes more money on items such as ring tones than single music tracks, what is the ring tone for the publishing industry?

One of the best answers to this question was the idea of modularisation. This involved publishers creating a new kind of product through the modularisation of their texts and then making extra materials available to purchase alongside the modulated materials. So in theory a customer could basically create their own resource/textbook. This idea of providing something different, so customers felt they weren’t just buying the same product online, was a key concept in the talks, suggesting this could be a path some publishers may go down.

NUP is always eager to find new ways of communicating with its customers. Many questions have arisen from this excellent source of information and the industry must work hard to improve its interactivity sooner, rather than later. Something we will be keeping a close eye on.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2010

2010-09-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

NUP will be once again venturing to the Frankfurt Book Fair on 6th-10th October 2010!

We visit the most prominent events each year such as London Book Fair and Frankfurt of course. We have even ventured all the way to the Tokyo Book Fair and Denver, Colorado!!!!!

Frankfurt Book Fair is steeped in history, as it dates back to the era of the invention of movable type in the 15th Century. The book fair was rebooted in 1949, when 205 German exhibitors came together for the first book fair after the war and has grown ever since. In 2008 the fair celebrated its 60 years anniversary.

Currently Frankfurt plays host to more than 7,300 exhibitors from 100 countries every year and has 299,000 visitors. Frankfurt is the largest book fair in the world, so it's not surprising that a lot of the industry attend. It's hard to grasp just how many business deals are made, how much new technologies are discovered and just how much the industry can change in those few shorts days, but it happens every year!!!! This article particularly highlights how the book fair is helping publishers bridge the gap between print and electronic information through the use of new technologies and services.

The fair has also been known to be the place where companies have announced the launch of their new products or software: like in the case of Google Editions at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair, which had the potential to change the entire publishing industry.

So of course NUP will be there you'd be unwise not to! We will be located in Hall 8:C921 and we invite you to pop by and say hello and see our new 2011 catalogue.

If you are interested in a scheduled business meeting though please use the following link and we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible. Contact Us.

NUP

Piracy......When will it be safe to tread in these new waters???

2010-08-24T03:21:00.000-07:00

At NUP we are constantly working towards developing a workable online presence. The biggest fear we have, as many other publishers, it seems will be the loss in our revenue stream. This posting from BitTorrent: 'eBook Puracy 'Surges' After iPad Launch' indicates that since the release of the iPad research suggests there has been an increase in downloads of ebooks but also states it is currently fairly paltry in comparison to that of film and music downloads. The posting does suggest a good reason for this poor showing: only a small number of people actually own an iPad.

David Carnoy also agrees with this low sales reason stating 'At the moment, book piracy is dwarfed by that of the music, movie and game industries. But it is gradually growing'.

The research from BitTorrent does contain a problem (which is mentioned), this being that only one download service was examined. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of these sites online making the sample size far too small meaning the results cannot be generalised to all consumer behaviour.

But the research does pose the question, which is on every Publishers mind, should we be worried about our online content ? Can we do more to protect it?

We think only time can really tell us how much of an impact piracy will have on our eBook sales, but for now we need to concentrate on our strategies for getting our ebooks out there and keeping them protected.

NUP

InsideNUP

2010-08-18T08:45:00.001-07:00

Coming soon!